Indus OS has features such as ‘text-to-speech’ and ‘swipe to text,’ where text in any Indian language can be translated or transliterated into English and vice versa with a swipe.J Vignesh | ET Bureau | March 09, 2016, 07:10 IST

With the majority of the people in the country being ‘non-English’ speakers, startups are increasingly looking at solutions in this space to address the growing needs of both businesses and individuals — from B2B (business to business) offerings to social networking platforms and shopping.

“India’s English language literacy is still less than 10% compared to the total literacy of 75%. This leaves over 500 million non-English literate, mobile users who are waiting to be part of the internet revolution,” said Arvind Pani, CEO of Reverie, a platform that allows automated content conversion and discovery across languages and user-generated content in more than 10 local languages.

The increasing penetration of smartphones has enabled seamless typing in regional languages, providing a platform for ideas such as Hindi social networking and micro-blogging site ShabdaNagari.

“In Hindi, there are 36 keys needed as compared to English where only 26 keys are required. With smartphones gaining popularity, their keyboards being touchscreen, it is easy to introduce a software or an app for using a Hindi keyboard,” said Amitesh Misra, CEO of ShabdaNagari.

The Kanpur-based startup has also integrated predictive text typing with which a Hindi word can be typed using an English keyboard.

The opportunity comes with its own set of problems.

“It was extremely difficult to find the right talent who can understand user experience for a regional audience. We now have experts deployed for each aspect of the product,” said Rakesh Deshmukh, CEO of Indus OS, a regional language provider that supports 12 languages.

Indus OS has features such as ‘text-to-speech’ and ‘swipe to text,’ where text in any Indian language can be translated or transliterated into English and vice versa with a swipe. It also has its own App Bazaar, which provides about 20,000 apps in regional languages.

The other challenge is to change the mindset of ‘English-literate’ decision makers.

“We had to spend a lot of time with our stakeholders on evangelising the need through case studies of other international markets like China and Europe, where the primary language isn’t English,” said Pani of Reverie, which counts Qualcomm, Intel, Accenture, HDFC Securities, Practo and Quikr among its customers.

“We have a collaborative housecart feature, where, in the same house a mother and son can share a common cart to add products. For this, local language made a lot of sense to us,” said Vaideeswaran Sethuraman, founder of Terraa, which offers a Kannada platform for its users.